Ayy, fellow Return of the Obra Dinn lover. Such a good game. Peerless in terms of vibe.

Get some Gamelan on the radio and turn it up to 11

Chinese EVs are very bad for Canadian national security. China cannot be trusted and is actively antagonistic to Canadian interests. The fact that any Canadian would want Chinese EVs on our streets and in our garages is a complete mystery to me.

Fuck china and their spy hardware on wheels.

Youtube would rather be able to track every user and make more profit per person than go big tent all audiences.

True, but consider that Google, Alphabet, whatever, is fundamentally an information broker. All of their services and technologies are simply a means to that end. They have no incentive to go big tent if it means sacrificing their ability to harvest data on individuals and groups.

I’m not saying TrueNAS and ZFS aren’t good. For large enterprise systems, arrays with sufficient redundancy, servers with reliable power management, I can see its advantages, esp. w/ snapshots, etc. I acknowledge that Open Media Vault is mickey mouse in comparison.

I just feel compelled to share my experience when I see people considering TrueNAS for their first foray into building a small home media server, running a z1 array, with no mention of battery backup or power management. ZFS isn’t inherently safer. It’s safer when paired with sufficient redundancy and power management.

When I built my first server, TrueNAS, ZFS, and Raid z1 made perfect sense. And I loved it for the first couple months. Then an update and unexpected shutdown rendered my storage pools unrecoverable. Had backups for most but not all of the files, and spent almost a year of bits of free time here wading in way over my head on highly technical support forum threads & there trying to bring the pools back online. Nothing worked, the array was toast.

I don’t know how tech savvy you are, but here’s the advice I’d give my past self - Take a few weeks to read documentation and play with TrueNAS before filling up your drives with stuff. Peek around in troubleshooting forums, see if the troubleshooting you may have to do is in line with your experience level.

After wiping my drives and starting over, I built around Open Media Vault. It’s less pretty and less feature rich than TrueNas, but it’s also much less fragile in a raid z1 setup and I never worry about it.

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Always worth taking a peek at a user’s home instance. Some are pushing out more ragebait than others.

I have a theory about her intentions for writing about killing that dog.

Noem published her autobiography while vying to be the republican running mate in the election. On the one hand, why would she choose to publish something so openly sinister in her autobiography, at such a consequential time for her political career? She must have known that story would get picked up and blasted in the media. But part of me wonders if maybe, that was her goal. Maybe by including the dog story in her book, Noem was sending a signal to Trump that she wouldn’t flinch to do the cruel, dirty work that maga wants done. And now here she is, doing dirty work.

Out of curiosity, in a perfect world and existing regulations excepted, what sort of firearm regulations would you like to see in Canada?

I know we live in a polarized political landscape. And I acknowledge it’s not possible to make everyone happy. But I also feel like, part of being a good politician is conducting yourself in such a way that large numbers of people don’t hate you. Poilievre failed at that, so I think it’s fair and proper that he’s on the receiving end of this political bullying.

And it’s comical that a man so gripped by antagonistic, indecent rhetoric is getting all huffy that citizens are making a mockery of his cowardly and stupid by-election. Obviously, instead of protesting, he should be asking himself why so many citizens are willing to dedicate their free time to fucking with his shit.

Filtering doesn’t necessarily have to be driven by AI.

Take recipes for example. Recipes are now almost impossible to get non AI results for via search engines. But, simple hardcoded parameters that set a preference for older results, ones without affiliate links (Marginalia does this), ones with fewer than 5 domains executing javascript on the site, some analysis of the date of the domain registration and activity on the domain, some analysis of the top level domain to filter out blogspam, these would all make the search results more human.

My hope is that eventually, there will be a paradigm of search engine optimization, maybe even an open standard for the absence of excessive javascript, affiliate links, social media buttons, etc. Sites that lack those elements are way less likely to be junk.

I think tools for detecting and filtering out ai material from search results would go a long way to improve the current situation, and is a middle ground between an internet revolution and a technological dystopia. There is still an unfathomably large amount of good information on the internet, the issue is that there is 20x more trash. And the trash is scaling rapidly, humans are not.

If you haven’t already, give the Marginalia search engine a try. They’re doing something interesting in this space. You can filter out results with javascript, affiliate links, tracking, ads, and cookies. After filtering, the internet feels a lot more like it did 20 years ago, more sincere, more human.

If I recall correctly, Marginalia is made and maintained by one guy. As the trash to good content ratio worsens, I think more people will want to build on and use projects like Marginalia.

Time is needed to forge new alliances and firm trade partners

True. Alliances are key for Canadian sovereignty and security. The nation should be cementing existing relationships with maximum effort. As patriotic as myself and other Canadians feel these days, it must be acknowledged - no imaginable scenario exists in which Canada alone has enough military might to act as a deterrent against US aggression.

Imagine that a fully functional nuclear arsenal wasn’t a generation away, and Canada had one right now. Even then, if the US made the insane decision that Canada was lebensraum, our nation’s military might alone could not prevent that.

I’m not even against a Canadian nuclear weapons program per se. But it makes no sense for Canada to pursue a nuclear weapons program right now, if the objective is to hold off a US threat. It’s comforting to imagine that there’s some panacea to the threats that Canada is facing right now, but I don’t see how nuclear fits that bill in any way.

It’s unfortunate that we even have to think these things. But anyway, that’s my 2c.

I’d like to be sealed in a sous vide bag, that way I can be perpetually protected from anything that tastes good and live forever.

First off, welcome in advance, enjoy your trip!

Bad news: Toronto traffic is nuts, and accoms are expensive. Good news: transit is good. Assuming you’re landing at pearson, the UP Express train takes you straight into downtown & it’s like $10. Anywhere you could want to go in the city centre is walkable or easy to get to on transit, no reason to drive, really. In certain spots during rush hour, it’s actually faster to walk than drive. But, that’s a good thing for exploring.

Don’t be afraid to ask people for help or directions while you’re here. People in Toronto and Vancouver have a lot of pride in their cities, and want visitors to have a good time, especially if they’re coming from overseas. Canadians are typically kind, and helpful!

The process to log in to the online portal of Outlook is so bad it’s crossed into comical territory. So much friction, only to shunt you to a full screen clippy copilot page.

I’d be curious to know what the usage statistics are for that page. Like, what could a person possibly accomplish there?

Car window shatters on a giraffe’s head as shocked couple inside try to wind it up when animal reached in for their food - Daily Mail, April 9 2018

Firearm laws in Canada are very strict, and not comparable to the American system. No serious Canadian politician is advocating for lax gun laws or an American-style system in terms of firearm ownership.

Under Trudeau, the first major Liberal movement on banning so-called assault style firearms came after the tragedy in Portapique. The gunman in that massacre used firearms smuggled from the States, and a pistol stolen off of an RCMP officer. The shooter was reported to the RCMP for having illegal firearms repeatedly, and months/years before the shooting occurred. So, I think it’s important to point out that no measure that the Liberals have moved on since 2020 would have changed the outcome in Portapique. That’s why law abiding firearm owners are pushing for increased enforcement, instead of new measures that uniquely target them.